Writer: Stewart Pringle
Director: Jack McNamara
In the wide expanse between two villages in 16th-century Northumbria, a game is being played. A bloody, days-long, battle of a game that we will eventually come to recognise as modern-day football. Stewart Pringle’s moody script is a tiny, intimate slice of life that aims to relate to something much larger than itself.
It is the dawn of game day 1553 and Percy (Ryan Nolan) is rallying for a win, despite Rowan’s (Lauren Waine) insistence that they will lose, just like they did last year and the year before and the one before that. Either way, these two working-class peasants aren’t going to affect the outcome as they have been placed miles away from either goalpost, waiting in a Godot-esque fashion for the action to come to them. When a mysterious man in a velvet cloak joins them waiting on the grassy knoll the play shatters into something much larger than a Tudor football drama.
The acting, overall, is fantastic. Nolan and Waine play their friendship like cheeky siblings, always looking to trip the other up. Waine in particular brings realism and nuance to her role, bringing an intrinsic relatibility to a character that would have died hundreds of years before any of us were born. Soroosh Lavasani as Samuel brings a real sympathy to his role of Catholic punching bag, spanning the more nuanced makeup of 16th-century religio-politics with weathered stability against the slightly tiresome Southerners = Poshos-Who-Don’t-Care trope.
The design is stunning in some places and disappointing in others. Costume by Verity Quinn instantly transports us to Tudor England with feudal fashion, well-worn and evocative of the June frost. Set, also by Quinn, fails to give any sense of scale to a pitch we are told multiple times is huge. The three main actors are hemmed into a small section of an already small stage, coming up against invisible barriers as they think about running after one another.
Pringle’s writing shines in its more simple moments. In the forward, he says in writing The Bounds “It wrote itself for about thirty pages and ran out of road […] But then in 2020 the world as I know it had ended, or at least paused, and I came back to ‘Tudor football idea D1.docx’ and suddenly it seemed to be ‘about’ all sorts of things” and that is maybe the problem.
What starts off as a carefully considered and wonderfully drawn piece of escapist theatre that has the potential to make a really punchy point about how the unending connection between class and football (if it so chose) has its boundaries moved again and again and eventually, it loses a sense of where the playing field starts and ends at all. As the lights come up and the well-deserved applause peters out, the audience is left with a lasting feeling of confusion rather than the camaraderie and recognition set up in the first few scenes.
Runs until 13 July 2024
